ASUS last week at CeBIT demonstrated its upcoming Xonar-series sound cards. The upcoming Xonar-series spawns two variants, the D2 and D2K in PCI and PCIe x1 interfaces. Dolby Digital Live and DTS Connect multi-channel audio encoding technologies are available for digital multi-channel audio. The Xonar-series also features 7.1-channel analog outputs for those that prefer analog to digital.

Early reports claim the ASUS Xonar-series feature an Analog Devices audio DSP, however, ADI denies any involvement in the sound card.

“I checked with our sales team and there is not an ADI part in this unit,” said Sandra Perry, product line manager, SoundMAX, DSP Division.

ASUS internal testing reveals the Xonar-series is capable of low total harmonic distortion rates. The Xonar-series has 0.000006% THD on all eight analog outputs and the single line input, between the frequencies of 20Hz to 20 kHz. ASUS also equips the Xonar-series with an EMI shield and touts it provides “stable audio quality.”

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thats my arguement with my brother in law(he sells expensive sound systems to people with more bucks then brains) he insists that better cables make better sound. I dont disagree but a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. and more often then not its the solder on the inside thats holding back the signal. not the wires that come with it.

Someone tried to convince me that a dedicated high end DVD player is far better than the DVD drive I use in my HTPC, because of the cheap PC ribbon cables, noisy power supply, interference, software decoding, etc.

How do you explain to someone like that the concept of DIGITAL...

A stream of bits decoded off a disc over a 50 cent SATA cable translates to 128 0 0 and send over a $5 HDMI cable translates to 128 0 0 on the display device at that exact pixel, the same exact way a $2000 DVD player.

What do those people think is inside their $2000 DVD players? With a HTPC I have the advantage of altering the codecs, etc., I'm not locked into a black box with pre-configured hardwired firmware. HD upscaling? Cleaner decoding? Buffering layer changes? Region compatibility? All things that can be done in software 100 times better than a dedicated box.

People that like to by expensive electronics are having a hard time justifying the cost difference in the digital domain. With analog signals, cables and things like that can make or break a good AV system. With digital you can use a $5 HDMI cable that is 50 feet long as long as it works. About the only thing to gain by paying for expensive digital cables is longer runs.

The signal can be distorted to hell and back on the shittiest cable possible, and as long as the threshold between a '1' and a '0' is preserved, it will look just as good as a $1000 cable on the same screen.

I agree with most of your points regarding digital signal transfer. However, there are differences in the way video upscaling and deinterlacing is done on HTPC and dedicated players.Most run-of-the-mill PCs don't really offer the quality per-pixel motion-adaptive deinterlacing found in players with Faroudja or Silicon Optic Realta chips, although a lot of that is changing with ATI's and NVIDIA's new GPUs.

Yeah, but in software, things can be changed and upgraded. I was thinking more a pure software decoder engines more than incomplete hardware offloading in graphics chips. That is all configurable. Personally I have no interest in upscaling DVDs after seeing 1080p with 1:1 mapping so I don't really pay attention to that realm.

But to say a PC DVD drive isn't as accurate in video rendering as the drive in a dedicated videophile player because of a cheap low quality ribbon cable? Come on... 12345 is going to be sitting in a DRAM chip as 12345 somewhere and fed to a TMDS transmitter all the same.

There is really no such thing as a digital circuit. Digital circuitry is just analog- with brackets of voltages cordoned off as 0's and 1's. If the air has static, or the cable runs too long and experiences voltage drop, or the internal wires are not balance and properly shielded from one another- there can be inductance which changes the voltage values above of below their norm and changes your 0 and 1.

Yes, the signal can be garbled off the board, but as long as those 'brackets' are maintained the signal goes through 100% accurate. It's all or nothing, the only requirement is that the cable be at least good enough quality and low resistance enough that the weak low voltage signal can be picked up on the other end.

If 5 volts is the minimum threshold to be a '1' and you send 0010 in pulses of 0.5 0.5 5.5 0.5 and you get a noise on the line and end up with 0.6 0.7 6.9 0.3 , in digital its still 0010 despite the noise. This is why digital systems have been used in computers from day one.

Thats not exactly how the signal is encoded in digital but it gets the point across. Any signal is analog by definition of the word 'signal' but the encoding method is digital and there is a threshold between a '1' and a '0' along with things like error correction, checksums, differential transmission to cancel mutual noise, etc. Things you don't have with raw analog.

On a analog transmission if you get noise like that, you just shifted all your hues, saturation, etc. and you can't get consistent result, esp. with the way color is encoded as phase and frequency. With digital everything is just evenly spaced strobes at a fixed frequency with a fixed amplitude.

With digital, the color grey is still 128 128 128 even with moderate signal noise as the digital encoding scheme can still pick up the swings even with significant noise. With analog you dont even know there is noise to begin with, you just end up with 135 123 140 on the other end instead of 128 128 128.

I'm simplifying it alot, but thats the basic idea.

The biggest problem with digital HDMI cables is impedance mismatching where you have connectors, couplers, etc.

The only difference with the cables might be that a $5 one will not last long, and a $25 one with minimal gold plating will. The other thing is that jitter might be present, but every TVs pass the data input through a signal processor, which corrects the signal.

With analog signals, power supply noise, DAC quality, etc. matters a lot more(Not to the point of buying a $2000 player tho. Get a $150 player, get $40 worth of better quality components, replace the ones in the player with those, and you have what a hundreds worth more player is).

SPDIF is a digital signal, but might not always give the greatest quality, but that depends of the source and receiver. Jitter might affect the SPDIF decoder and audio DACs, as they're hardware(and synchronous, data comes in and out) and do not necessarily understand clearly an unclear signal. A software DSP would correct it(It has time to work on the signal), but not every receivers work with one.

Here, the computer has an advantage. For example, the computer doesn't read the DVD in real-time, so it has time to re-read the data if it's been misread. To the opposite, a standalone DVD player running at 1x has to do everything in real time, and will use hardware-dependant error correction, and the data on the disc isn't re-read a second time.

It's the same thing through all the computer : The data is asynchronous, it's sent in packets, and re-sent and corrected if it's not valid, so, with a computer, you're sure that the data read by the laser is the same going to the PCI and PCI-Ex buses to your sound card and video card(Unless there's processing somewhere between). An overly scratched disc is the only thing that could get the data wrong.

Then, it's up to the sound and video card to do the async to sync digital job(They're the only things that can get the sound worse). For DVI/HDMI, it's up to the TV to be good. For the sound, the sound card might play with the sound quality, and a good external sound card is preferred to a not-high-end receiver(Simply for the way the stream is handled between the SPDIF or I2S stream transmitter and receiver).

OK, compared to the computer, a $2000 player does every thing in sync and in real-time and doesn't take the time to correct everything. It's DVD drive is running at 1x, forget error correction, and the signal that comes in is coming out instantly. Every of the ICs in the player could be affected by jitter, as well as the signals between components as they are not asynchronous packets.

BTW, I've been talking about jitter for a while, it's important because if the signal shape is not as square and synchronized as possible, the reciever might not know immediatly if the bit received is switched or kept to 1 or 0, it might hesitate and cause errors in the output it will give. A system working in real-time is going to be affected by this as it's directly affected by the input signal. DSPs and computers process data in software and not in sync, so they have the time to receive the data correctly and handle it the same way.

Thats what I try to tell people all the time and they never listen.It only needs to be able to distinguish between a 1 and a 0.Maybe I should print out your speech and hand it the next person I see trying to act smarter than they are.

Remember that the conection betwen the the RCA jacks its quite poor due to only a few contact spots, thats why you need to make it as good as you can, when you solder a cooper wire to that gold plated connector, that solder make it almost a perfect connection. So the weakest link is the rca conector, also remembre that the cable is only carring a signal, so that signal will be amplified later, thus amplifing also all the noise picked up by the cable in the way from the source to the amplifier.

I dont think a cable is worth $500, but I like to use good quality cables, I have spent for my HT about $200 in cables. also good cables usually last longer, and after installing everything, I dont want to mess with it again to change a bad cable. :)

Yeah I use high quality heavy duty cables for my speakers and analog video where it counts. I think I paid at most $200 just for a pair of heavy duty molded cables with gold plated banana plugs for my front main speakers, and in retrospect that was probably slightly too much... but at least they look nice since they are visible.

I also went extra careful running a 30 foot insulated and shielded component video cable by spending $100 to ensure that it was 3 independant 75 ohm broadcast grade coax cables, of the kind suitable to carry high bandwidth 1080p over a 30 foot run in a perm. in wall installation for a projector. The wall jack that is really no more than a bunch of RCA couplers is my weak link, but it's unavoidable.

The s-video cable... well that was the lowest signal I was willing to wire up for a HDV system (forget composite) and just got some cheap cable. s-video sucks anyway and you can't change that by throwing money at it. Besides my sources are just pre-component video game consoles. For example the SNES which put out 256x224 through a cheapo RGB->NTSC RF noise generator doesn't look so hot blown up on a HD projector no matter how much you mess with it... I have slight ghosting, but I don't know if thats avoidable with a better cable as S-video isn't typically desireable for long runs in the first place.

The HDMI cable was like $40 for a 10 meter run, the cheapest I could find. My only concern was that the signal merely GET to the display over the long run. As long as that happened, the image would be perfect. Digital is kinda a 'it works or it doesn't' thing.

Unless you are running unusual distances, a fiber optic cable is a fiber optic cable. A $5 one and a $100 THX Monster one will have absolutely NO difference in that 4 foot cable from your PS3 to your stereo!

That's an extremely simplistic view of digital. From a practical standpoint it is generally true, however, as your thresholds get noisier, the receiving circuit has to guess as to whether it's a 0 or a 1. Granted, even if it makes an error, you'll probably never hear it as it's one bit out of many. OTOH, the same type signal in your computer will drive it to it's knees because every bit is critical.

Digital audio, be it HT, cell phone, whatever, will typically work until it doesn't. The threshold is almost, but not quite like throwing a switch. Analog actually holds up better after a certain point because the signal is still there, however noisy; where a digital system becomes random junk.

Only partially applicable, I know. But it's an important distinction in general.

I think the cables do make a difference- to an extent. I'd agree that the gold-plated thing is stupid- silver would be cheaper, and work better! But the transmission of data over one cable is where you get interference. So yes- the chain is only as strong as its weakest link, but the weakest link is usually the longest one that is exposed tot he outside ~ the wires connecting equipment.